


Among Monsters

by tei



Category: Hannibal (TV), The Poison Path - Hope Zane
Genre: F/F, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-17 05:03:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21261026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tei/pseuds/tei
Summary: “This will do very nicely, Magdeline Blackweir,” he announced, in a voice that sounded like no other noble Mag had ever heard. “You and your companion are welcome to our table, and to rest here for the night before you continue on your journey.”
Relationships: Mag/Serafina, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11





	Among Monsters

They were half an hour’s walk away from House Gildleaf when panic finally hit Mag like a physical weight. 

It felt like she had suddenly run into a wall at full speed, and she actually had to look down at the snow-covered earth to check if she was still standing on it, and not lying on the ground. She was suddenly very aware that she hadn’t had anything to eat for days. Since before her death and salvation. 

“I know,” said Serafina, like she could read Mag’s thoughts. Mag knew she couldn’t, that wasn’t what Serafina _did_, but the panic crushing her from within was trying to convince her that maybe she could, maybe Serafina was one of Neit’s peons too, maybe Mag had made a terrible mistake— 

Mag crouched down, bracing herself against the ground, breathing hard. She knew it wasn’t true, knew it was just her own body and mind betraying her and feeding her lies, but that didn’t do anything to curb her flinch when she felt Serafina’s hand on her back. 

“Where are we going?” Mag managed to ask. 

Serafina breathed out hard through her nose, like a mockery of a laugh. “If you were in a better state for ribbing, I’d say that you’re the leader of this exile expedition, not me,” she pointed out. “But since you just rescued me from imprisonment and probably execution…” she sighed. “I do have a destination in mind for today. I don’t know if it’s a good idea— actually, I’m pretty sure it’s not— but with the First Hamlet gone… I don’t know what else to do.”

Mag’s breathing slowed somewhat. A destination in mind for _today._ She would get to eat within the day. She swallowed hard and pushed herself back up, using her snow-covered hands to attempt to cool her burning cheeks and forehead. 

“Where is it?” She asked. 

Serafina bit her lip and looked away, then started slowly walking forward again, clearly intending Mag to follow. Mag did, her feet feeling heavy on the ground but once more capable of walking. 

“I don’t know, exactly.” Serafina spoke quietly, and there was a slight tremor to her voice. “It’s… not a place accessible from this realm, necessarily. Or rather— it is, but only through an _erda_ that I cannot wield. Or rather— that I _will_ not.”

Mag felt her throat tighten, tears well in her eyes as suddenly the image of a safe haven for the night slipped away. “Great,” she forced out. “Well, thanks for telling me about it, then.” 

“But you can,” said Serafina.

Mag stopped, forcing Serafina to stop too and look at her. “You expect me to make use of an _erda_ that you could use yourself, but refuse to?”

Serafina looked very still, still and sad and proud. Her eyes bore into Mag, taking in the small slash on her neck from the guard’s sword, her steely blue lips, the power and desperation in her eyes. 

“Yes,” she said simply. “The Goddess has given you a gift, or a curse, that is yours alone. It is unfair of me to expect you to make use of it?”

Mag shivered. Through the cloud of hunger and pain and fear, she could feel the poison running through her veins, a constant thrum of deathly power beneath the surface of her being. 

“No,” Mag said quietly. “It’s not unfair.” 

They walked on. 

The First Hamlet was burned, but human nature is to return home and rebuild, even when it isn’t necessarily logical. Clearly, those who had escaped the massacre had chosen to hide out in the forest and the boglands until they could return, in lieu of re-settling in another hamlet. It wasn’t long before Mag started seeing evidence of escapees in the forest: piles of ashes where campfires had been and food detritus littered the paths that Mag and Serafina walked along. 

It felt like hours, or days, or perhaps it was only minutes, before Mag worked up the courage and energy to ask, “Where are we going, that you’re not sure we should go and that requires _erda_ which I must perform?”

Serafina was long enough in answering that Mag started to think perhaps she wouldn’t. Then, she finally said, “When the children of the highborn are rude to their parents, the parents threaten to send them to the Boglands. When the children of the Boglands are rude, what monsters lurk ready to punish them?”

Mag frowned. It wasn’t an answer that made any sense, but clearly it was the one she was going to get for now. 

A while later, Mag tried, “Serafina, I haven’t been taught as an _erdan._ Are you sure this is something I…?”

Serafina laughed, a bitter sound. “You misunderstand,” she said. “There is no special spell required, for this summoning. Only an act that you have performed many times before.”

Mag felt like retching. _An act that you have performed many times before_. Something Serafina would not do for her. Mag’s gift. Erich, Marianne, Lilia, Arin, the guard outside of Serafina’s cell. Her gift, death.

She kept walking, because there was nothing else to do. Before, the poison inside her had felt like a weapon; now it felt like it was burning her from the inside out. Like perhaps there was nothing good left inside her at all; it had all been burned away to make room for Moramere’s gift. 

She was surprised when Serafina spoke again, without being prompted, and she sounded more gentle. “Mag, I wouldn’t ask this for you if there were any other way,” she said. 

“I know,” said Mag. “So I need to make a sacrifice to— what? Some sort of monstrous _erdan_?” 

“Not an _erdan_, no,” said Serafina. “But also not exactly not one. Your gift from the Goddess was to become what you consumed. Consider that there are others who have undergone the same transformation, and willingly.”

It was inevitable, with the residents of the First Hamlet having scattered, that they would eventually come across someone alone. Serafina spotted him, a ways away down the path, filling a bucket at the river. She stopped, and slipped behind a tree for cover, and then simply _looked_ at Mag, her eyes wide and sad and expectant and frightened. 

Mag wanted to ask _what, now?_ or _him?_ or _are you sure?_ She wanted to ask, but she didn’t. Because the least she could do, now that she was a monster, is spare Serafina from having to say _kill him_ out loud. 

An innocent. Not Erich, who deserved it. Not Marianne, who didn’t deserve it, but ill-used her anyway. Not Lilia or Arin, when her hand had been forced. Not the guard, who stood between Mag and her only friend. 

An innocent. A _subject_, if Mag had still been the ruler of House Gildleaf. 

And it was so _easy._ So easy to glide up behind him, her hands cracked and bleeding from the cold and the dry air and her dehydration. So easy to clasp them around his neck and squeeze, the poison shooting through his body even as she squeezed as hard as she could to help it along. It felt intimate, almost like they were friends. Or lovers. 

And then the body was on the ground, lifeless but still warm enough to burn a jagged imprint into the snow. And then Serafina was beside her, her arm around Mag but pointedly averting her eyes from the sacrificial lamb at their feet, and then there was a man emerging from the deep cover of the trees. 

Mag startled when she saw him— not because he was particularly intimidating, but perhaps because she’d simply become accustomed to being startled by everyone, in the past few weeks. Serafina’s hand tightened around her shoulder, and the man’s face came into sharper resolution as he approached. He sported healed but significant scars across his cheek and forehead, but his gaze was gentle as he took in the scene, with Mag and Serafina standing protectively over the dead body of the villager. 

“Can you carry him?” the man asked. “It won’t be far.”

Mag tried. She truly did, but the villager was heavy, and she was exhausted, and every time she tried to take her fair share of the man’s weight over her shoulders she buckled at the knees and nearly stumbled face-down into the snow. Tears blurred her vision, and then she felt a gentle hand on her shoulder, pushing her away. 

The scarred man’s face swam in front of her own, and he helped Mag and Serafina put the body back on the ground. “It’s okay,” he said. “I will carry it with your friend, poison-witch.”

_Poison-witch_ should have felt like an awful thing to be called, but the man said it kindly, and Mag felt too exhausted to care. It was true, anyway, as far as she could tell. Mag found that she could no longer state with authority what she was. _Queen_ and _prisoner_ were both no longer true. Perhaps whatever this man saw her as, would be what she truly was. 

Serafina repositioned herself so that the scarred man was holding the villager’s shoulders, and Serafina the thighs. Serafina seemed almost shy, slightly awestruck by an entity that she had heard of only in whispers and nightmares suddenly present in the flesh. “May we know your name?” she asked hesitantly. 

“Will,” said the man simply, and any question of his birth station disappeared from Mag’s mind. He must be a Boglands villager, or have been one once. 

Will and Serafina hoisted the villager much more easily than Mag had, and she followed behind them as Will led the way through the trees. 

The house appeared suddenly enough in front of them that Mag understood better why Serafina had said _not a place accessible from this realm_; she wondered if, had they not been carrying a sacrifice with them, she could perhaps have walked over this exact spot and never encountered the house at all. It was much bigger than a First Hamlet hut, built of stone and clay with a strong foundation and shored up in several places against the unstable, shifting ground. A curl of smoke from a wide stone chimney and the glow of light from the fireplace inside indicated that there was someone inside. 

Will and Serafina dumped the body down on the verandah outside the door, and Will raised his eyebrows at Serafina. She was breathing hard, both with exertion but also clearly with fear. 

Will seemed sympathetic to the fear, at least. He nudged the body with his toe. “Hannibal will be happy with this,” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”

Serafina nodded and looked at Mag, who was trailing behind. She felt fear, but her hunger and exhaustion had consumed the fear until she could no longer feel it as sharply as Serafina obviously could. And of course, Mag didn’t even really know what Serafina was afraid _of._ A Boglands monster story named Hannibal, apparently.  
At that moment the door swung open, and a man appeared in the frame who was as clearly highborn as Mag had ever seen. His eyes swapt calmly over the body, then entirely skipped over Will and Serafina to land on Mag. 

He stepped out the door into the cold air, advancing on Mag in a way that made her have to remind herself not to shrink away. She steeled herself and met his gaze, and it felt like staring into something deep and infinite. 

“So,” Hannibal said, “This is our poison-queen.” Mag figured _poison-queen_ was actually slightly better than _poison-witch_, and nodded. Hannibal brought his hands up to cup her face, holding her in place as he looked at her. 

Then, before she could warn him not to, he dipped a finger down to her neck, where blood still oozed from the wound made by the guard’s sword. He touched it gently, in a way that made her both nauseous from pain and want to press into it. Then he raised the finger covered in inky, silvery-blue blood up to his lips and tongued the poison into his mouth. 

Mag gasped, but Hannibal just raised his eyebrow slightly and turned to the dead body of the villager. 

“This will do very nicely, Magdeline Blackweir,” he announced, in a voice that sounded like no other noble Mag had ever heard. “You and your companion are welcome to our table, and to rest here for the night before you continue on your journey.”

He strung an arm around Will’s shoulders, as casually as anyone welcoming their lover home, and ushered him inside. Mag and Serafina followed. 

The interior of the house was a mix of the kind of finery that Mag was used to at House Gildleaf, and the rustic intimacy that she had sometimes, in her worst moments with Erich, imagined might be the birthright of the hamlet-dwellers. Tapestries covered the walls, along with mounted trophies representing most of the large animals that dwelled in the forest. A living area filled with luxurious furniture backed directly onto a dining room with a large table that, while sturdy, seemed to have been constructed by hand. 

By the time Mag and Serafina had shed their outerwear at the door, Hannibal was returning from the doorway that must lead to the kitchen with a selection of large knives. 

“A cut from the limbs, I think,” he was saying contemplatively. “As fascinating as our royal guest’s gift is, I cannot imagine the poison would improve the flavour of the heart. Will, perhaps you could see that they are bathed and dressed in something more practical?”

Mag looked down at her gown, the same one that she had put on to replace the gown burned at her coronation, the same one she had been wearing when she dragged herself through the snow and muck in Lady Eva’s garden. She looked like an absolute mess, and was suddenly embarrassed to be seen like this in Hannibal’s comfortable, tidy house. 

Will led Mag and Serafina up carpeted stairs to a second level with three doors. One was closed— Mag assumed it belonged to Hannibal and Will. The other seemed set up as a guest room of sorts, and the third was a bathing chamber. Will nodded towards the bedroom. “Look in the wardrobe,” he said. “Even if there’s nothing that fits all that well, at least it’s clean.” 

Mag could hear the sounds of him drawing a bath in the next room, and she collapsed to sitting on the floor— her dress was too dirty to even contemplate touching the white cover of the bed with it— while Serafina opened the wardrobe and began sifting through it. 

On some level, Mag knew that this wardrobe was where the clothes on the villager she had killed were going to end up. She couldn’t bring herself to care, though, or even think very hard about the fact that there were items in every size and style. She was just grateful when Serafina tossed her a simple blue dress— plainer than anything she had ever worn before in her life— and several pairs of thick, warm stockings. She set them on the bed. 

Will poked his head into the bedroom. “There is a bath waiting for you,” he said. “Be dressed and ready for dinner in an hour.” Something complicated, possibly humour, passed over his face as he said, “Don’t be late.”

Mag felt like she was drifting through a dream as she led the way to the bathing chamber, and Serafina followed. Mag closed the door behind them, and sighed at the sight of the large basin filled with steaming hot water. 

Serafina was already undressing, and Mag’s stomach fluttered with something only a little bit similar to anxiety. Serafina’s skin was smooth and unmarked, and she straightened up to look at Mag with no self-consciousness whatsoever. 

Mag’s fingers fluttered nervously as she reached back, trying to figure out how she would even get the gown off of herself. “You’re not— you don’t have to— you’re not my maid—” her shoulders protested with pain as she tried to twist them behind her back to unfasten the gown. 

Serafina rolled her eyes. “I’m your friend, Mag,” she said, and the simple statement combined with the tenderness and affection with which she said it nearly brought tears to Mag’s eyes. “It doesn’t make me your servant if I help you out of your gown.”

Mag nodded and turned around, holding her hair up and out of the way. 

Serafina had seen her scars before. She’d showed them to the entire court, after all. But this was different. It was different when Serafina’s fingers trailed lightly over the back of her neck, soothing her like she was a skittish horse, before even beginning to unfasten the gown. It was different in how her hands smoothed over every inch of skin that they uncovered, like the ruined topography of Mag’s back was a new land to be explored and charted and cherished. 

It was different when the gown slipped to the floor and Serafina’s slim fingers slipped underneath Mag’s undergarments, exposing her fully to the warm, steam-filled air. Serafina’s belly and chest pressed against her back, practically holding her up as Mag sagged with relief at being free of the clothes she’d been wearing for her last days as the ruler of House Gildleaf. Walking out of the castle had felt like an ending; being stripped bare, here in a no-man’s-land of Bogland fairy story, felt like a new beginning. 

“Water’s getting cold,” Serafina murmured against the skin of Mag’s shoulder. “Guess we don’t want to be late to dinner.”

Despite herself, Mag giggled a little. “Kind of sounds that way,” she admitted. 

Serafina settled herself into one side of the basin, while Mag stayed on the floor for a moment longer to wipe any remnants of her poison blood off of herself with a sponge. When she was satisfied that she wouldn’t poison the water, she slipped in and arranged herself in the warm water facing Serafina, their knees tangling together, feet bumping up against each others’ hips. 

The water felt so good that Mag couldn’t help moaning a little, running her hands down her own legs to feel how the dirt and caked-on salt of pain and fear washed away so easily in the water. She leaned her head back, letting her legs slip forward a little more to glide against Serafina’s slick skin, and wet her hair, which had started to feel matted with grease. 

The sloshing of water, quiet whisper of skin being cleaned. “Thank you for bringing me here,” Mag whispered finally. 

“You brought me here,” Serafina whispered back, and her voice is no longer horrified, but reverent. “Thank _you._”

Mag squeezed her eyes closed. She had spent so much time since their flight just thinking about the next few hours, about where they would get their next meal. Now that the scents of a meal being prepared were wafting up the stairs and under the crack of the wooden door to the bathing chamber, and her mind was wandering too far afield. 

“Where are we going to go?” she asked, and she could hear the edge of panic creeping back into her voice.

Serafina’s hand landed on her head, patting down her newly-clean hair soothingly. “Elsewhere,” she said, and the way she said it actually made it sound like an answer. “The Old Country is not the only place, Mag. You know so little of the world outside.”

“And you know more?” Mag sniffed.

“No,” Serafina admitted. “But we’re new people now. We can learn together.”

***  
Mag sat down to dinner across from Hannibal, and Serafina across from Will. Mag was wearing the simple blue dress from the wardrobe full of sacrifices’ clothes, and she was cleaner than she remembered being in a very long time, and she _did_ feel new. 

Mag had killed, and been crowned Queen, and loved, and killed again, and died. She should have felt ancient, but she didn’t. She felt like a child, stepping into a world where everything was new and fascinating and terrifying at once. 

And it was _wonderful_. 

Hannibal placed a plate in front of her, and Mag knew exactly what it was. What she had done. She stared into his eyes, the man who had eaten _erdan_ and absorbed their power, and said, “This is monstrous.”

“_Mag,_” hissed Serafina, but Hannibal silenced her with a hand held up in her direction. Instead, he locked eyes with Mag. “It is,” he said, and there was a fierce joy in his eyes that Mag wanted to fall into.

If she could not be good, could not be pure, could not be royal— she could be _this._

“I’m a monster too,” she said, and picked up her fork and knife. “Tell me, Hannibal, have you travelled beyond the Old Country?”

“Extensively,” he answered, and Mag felt Serafina relax beside her. Will picked up a bottle of wine, and poured portions for the four of them. 

“Tell me about it,” Mag said. “Tell me everything.”


End file.
